The ‘Three Maries’ is in many respects the most attractive of the pictures ascribed to Hubert, but his most famous work was a larger picture, or assemblage of pictures framed together, the ’Adoration of the Lamb,’ in St. Bavon’s Church at Ghent.  It is an altar-piece—­a painting set up over an altar in a church or chapel to aid the devotions of those worshipping there.  Many of the panels of the Ghent altar-piece are now in the Museums of Berlin and Brussels.  They belonged to the wings or shutters which were made to close over the central parts, and which used also to be painted outside and inside with devotional or related subjects.  The four great central panels on which these shutters used to close are still at Ghent.  The subject of the ’Adoration of the Lamb’ was taken from Revelations, where before the Lamb has opened the seals of the book, St. John says: 

And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.

Hubert has figured this verse by assembling, as in one time and place, representatives of Christendom.  They who worship are the prophets, apostles, popes, martyrs, and virgins.  On each side of the central panel the just judges, the soldiers of Christ, the hermits, and the pilgrims, advance to join the throng around the Lamb.  Most beautiful of all is the crowd of virgin martyrs bearing palms, moving over the green grass carpeted with flowers, to adore the Lamb of God, the Redeemer of the World.  Above, God the Father, the Virgin Mother, and St. John the Baptist, with crowns of wonderful workmanship, are throned amid choirs of singing and playing angels on either hand.

The picture does not illustrate the description of the Adoration of the Lamb in the fifth chapter of Revelations so faithfully as the picture of the ‘Three Maries’ illustrated St. Matthew.  The Lamb has not seven horns and seven eyes, and the four beasts and twenty-four elders are not falling down before it and adoring.  The Lamb is an ordinary sheep, and the picture is a symbolic expression of the Catholic faith, founded upon a biblical text, but not what could be described as ‘a Bible illustration.’  People in the Middle Ages liked to embody their faith in a visible form, and we are told that theologians frequently drew up schemes of doctrine which painters did their best to translate into pictures, and sculptors into sculpture.  Such works of art were for instruction rather than beauty, though some also served well the purpose of decoration.